Mural Barn Near Marshall, Michigan

For the last year and a half that we've been traveling to Michigan to visit Doug's brother, we've been driving by this beautiful barn, with a large mural painted on the side. On our last trip, I managed to snap a drive-by picture of it.

The opportunity to snap a photo from the highway is somewhat limited because of the hill in front of the barn. And then, when the corn is up in the summer, the roof is about all you can see.

An internet search for some information about the barn and the mural led me to Jan Corey Arnett, The Barn Lady. Jan was very helpful with information about the barn and has some photos of it here that are way better than mine.

The mural, called "The Heart of Heatherbrook," was completed in 2007, and is supposed to last 10 years without being repainted. Being on the south side of the barn, it is very subject to sun fade and, likely, to a lot of highway pollution.

According to Jan, there are several such murals around the county, all done under the same series of grants. This is regarded as one of the best, if not the best, and most enduring of all.

Jan's website states, "The mural represents the talents of the Battle Creek Society of Artists, working under the leadership of professional muralist, Tony Hendrick, Grand Ledge, Michigan. It is funded by a grant from the Calhoun County Arts & Industry Council."

Jan told me in an email that one of the requirements was that the mural depict local history. There is a lake not too far away where the sandhill cranes spend their summers, hence the sandhill cranes in the foreground. Prisoners from Jackson State Prison, as well as migrant labor, picked fruit when that farm was a thriving fruit farm, hence the man picking fruit.

The barn in the mural is a representation of the very barn on which it appears.

I hope you will go to Jan's website, where you can see photos of this and several other barns and read their stories.

Autumn Road Trip

On Thursday, Doug and I drove to Battle Creek, Michigan, to visit Doug's brother, Dennis. 

Some of you will recall that Dennis had to have his left leg amputated below the knee in April, 2014. He's been out of the hospital for a year now, living in an apartment in Battle Creek, with the help of a Home Health Aide who comes in several times a week to assist with all the chores that Dennis can't do for himself.

Thursday was such a beautiful fall day that, after a meal at Cracker Barrel, we went for a drive through the Battle Creek countryside. When I saw this "checkerboard" barn, I asked Doug to stop so I could get some pictures.

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Then, on the way home that evening, I snapped these pictures of some of the fall foliage along the highway.

A Look Back at Fall

The first week of November, 2013, Doug and I and our friend, Pat, spent several days at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.

 

The fall color season draws huge numbers of visitors to the Smokies in October, making lodging rates in the area ridiculously expensive. Since those rates drop drastically the first week of November, that's when Doug and I usually make our fall visit to this national park. By that late in the season, the colors are usually completely gone in the higher elevations and past their peak in the lower elevations, but there's always enough color remaining to charm the senses.

Little Greenbrier Schoolhouse

 

According to Wikipedia, the Little Greenbrier School, built in 1882, functioned as the community school until 1936. During that time, it also served as the house of worship for a Primitive Baptist church. We've never seen the building this dark before. Apparently, the Park Service had recently given it a darker coat of stain.

Little Greenbrier Cemetery, near the schoolhouse

This old barn can be seen from the road leading into the national park from Wears Valley.

This is the house that goes with the barn.

These trees were in a rest area where we stopped on our way to Tennessee.

Yellowstone: South Entrance and West Thumb

You've already seen a picture of the John Moulton Barn on my last post, but I found the following picture, shot by Doug, on the camcorder when I downloaded the video from our trip. I thought it was even nicer than the one I posted and wanted to include it here.

As we left the Tetons on September 19th, we drove into Yellowstone National Park by way of the south entrance, then continued up the eastern side of the lower loop, around the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. (The road through Yellowstone is sort of a figure 8 and the sections are commonly referred to as the lower loop and the upper loop.)

 

 This map can help you see that figure 8, as well as the entrance roads into the park.

 

Lewis Falls

Yellowstone Lake. That's a steam vent in the foreground. They're everywhere in this park.

Another view of Yellowstone Lake, without the steam vent.

There had been a heavy snow in Yellowstone the day before, and the mountain peaks were putting on a show.

Another look at the mountains from Lake Village.

It was about 5:30 PM when we reached Lake Village, and I suddenly realized that we were supposed to call the motel in West Yellowstone by 6 PM if we weren't going to be arriving by that time. Yikes! I had no cell phone service in the park, and I couldn't get the pay phones at Lake Village to let me call out of state. (Yellowstone is in Wyoming, but West Yellowstone is in Montana.) So, instead of eating at the Lake Village Cafeteria as we had planned, we had to make haste to get to the motel.

 

All was well. We arrived at 7 PM, and our room was waiting for us. Whew!

In and Around Grand Teton National Park

The photographs in today's post were all taken in and around Grand Teton National Park on the afternoon of September 19th.

Horse pasture at the base of the Grand Tetons

T. A. Moulton Barn

John Moulton Barn

Old Fencing at the site of the John Moulton Barn

Jackson Lake

A little fall color

We covered a lot of ground that day...meeting up with Betty in Dubois, then seeing the beautiful scenery and horses between Dubois and the Grand Tetons, then a quick tour of Grand Teton National Park; and we're not finished yet. Later that afternoon, we drove from the Tetons into Yellowstone National Park, where we did some sightseeing on our way to our lodging in West Yellowstone, Montana. So the next posts from this trip will feature some scenery from Yellowstone.

On another note, some of you who have been with me for awhile might remember when I wrote about my cousin, Bill, here. Well, we lost Bill on November 8, when he was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was a very experienced rider, having ridden motorcycles for probably 50 years. He has ridden solo on a  Four Corners tour, where he rode to the four corners of the continental United States. He also rode solo from his home in Ohio to Alaska, tent camping along the way. On the day he was killed, he was just on a day trip to the neighboring state of Indiana.

Anyway, I apologize for ending this post on a sad note, but somehow I just couldn't let Bill's passing go unmentioned.

  

Barns

There are so many interesting barns in our part of the country. Today I want to show you some of them.

The angle of the above shot makes it look as if this is all one barn, but there are actually about 20 feet separating the metal structure from the wooden one. These two barns always catch my eye, partly because of the texture and colors in the wooden one and the interesting shades of green on the metal one.

Below are closer looks at each of them.

It's difficult to say whether the lighter shades of green resulted from someone's artistic flair or from an attempt to cover someone else's flair for graffiti.

Now, the following photograph is of a barn that we pass on our way to Ouabache State Park. There was no place to stop the car on the busy highway, so this was a drive-by shot.

This barn is quite large, and I suspect it's very old. It's a "bank barn"...one that is built into the side of a hill or bank, allowing ground-level access to both the upper and lower levels.

Today marks my third anniversary of blogging. I began this adventure on September 10, 2010, never imagining all the interesting people I would meet in the process and all the new things I would learn and see through each of your blogs. It's been fun.

If you want to see how it started, click here to see my very first post.

An Interesting Barn

This barn is on a corner near the restaurant where we eat lunch every Sunday. It's always intrigued me, so I captured a few pictures of it recently.

Most of the bricks used in the construction of the barn are hollow. I have no idea of the purpose for which the barn was originally built, but it seems to be used for miscellaneous storage these days.

It kind of looks as if there may have been living quarters in the top section at one time or another.

Some Amish Farm Scenes

One of the things I enjoy about walking at the reservoir is that the path, on top of the high bank surrounding the water, allows good views of the Amish farms that surround the reservoir. Following are several photos  taken at the reservoir on June 19th.

Amish woman cutting hay

An open gate between pastures

An Amish barn

A panorama view showing two houses and the same barn from the prior photo

Solar Panels

This is the farm where the construction was going on in a previous post.

Many of the Amish have built separate buildings on their property, where they can host the church meetings when their turn comes up in the rotation. Church meetings used to always be in the homes of the various families in the district, but more and more of these separate buildings are appearing on Amish farms.

And here is one last picture of an Amish farm.:

  

This one is not near the reservoir but can be seen from a highway that we frequently travel. It was a late-afternoon drive-by shot.

A Smoky Day in the Tetons

On September 23, we drove from West Yellowstone, where we had been staying, down through the South Entrance and, from there, to Grand Teton National Park. Before leaving Yellowstone, though, we stopped to see Kepler Cascades.

Kepler Cascades - Yellowstone

Then we continued on to Grand Teton National Park, known for its majestic mountain scenery. Unfortunately, the smoke from numerous wildfires almost completely obscured those mountain views.

Grand Tetons hidden by smoke

Another view of the smoke-covered mountains with some fall color in the foreground

By mid-afternoon, the thick smoke had lifted, leaving the mountains in a smoky haze.

Since the mountain views were disappointing, we went looking for wildlife. The park newspaper suggested that the road between the towns of Moose and Wilson offered good opportunities for bear sightings, so that's where we headed.

We hadn't gone far before seeing this moose grazing in a small pond.

A little further down the road was this big bull moose.

And this is the crowd gathered to photograph yonder moose.

After getting our photos of the bull moose, we returned to our vehicle and were preparing to continue on down the road. Before we could work our way out of the jumble of cars parked haphazardly by those hurrying to photograph the moose, we looked across the road and saw a bear in the woods. (Sorry, no picture...again) Sitting on a log not 20 feet from the bear was a man.

My first thought was that he had seen the bear and had foolishly gone over there to get a photo. The bear was just passing through, gorging on berries as it went. When it was gone, the man came across the road to where several of us had been watching. He looked a little shaken. It seems he had just gone over there to sit on that log while waiting for his wife or friend to shoot some pictures of the moose. The bear came through the woods, surprising him. So he just sat very still and waited for the bear to leave. I suppose he felt reasonably safe, with all of us standing across the road watching the whole drama unfold.

Following are a few more photos from this visit to the Tetons.

The T. A. Moulton Barn on Mormon Row

The John Moulton Barn, also on Mormon Row

A last look at the Tetons in the late-afternoon light